The Problem at the Core of Progressive Foreign Policy
In 2016, Donald Trump took on and defeated the Republican foreign-policy establishment. Some progressives wonder if they may be able to accomplish the same feat in the Democratic Party in 2020. They are looking for a nominee who rejects the post–Cold War bipartisan consensus, which they believe makes the United States too quick to get into wars and too committed to American primacy, in favor of a strategy of restraint.
The newly formed Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—founded with large grants from the Charles Koch Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations—is the latest addition to this effort. Quincy seeks to bring together progressives with anti-intervention conservatives to “restore the pursuit of peace to the nation’s foreign-policy agenda,” as its co-founder Andrew Bacevich put it. It’s not just Quincy. A number of scholars and experts have written thoughtful pieces trying to flesh out a progressive alternative.
If the progressives succeed, we could be on the cusp of a revolution in U.S. foreign policy along the lines of the rise of internationalism in the 1940s or neoconservatism in the 1980s. However, the revolutionaries have their work cut out for them. Thus far, the progressive presidential candidates are closer to President Barack Obama’s worldview than their rhetoric lets on.
The progressive candidates have signaled their desire to pursue a policy in which the United States reduces its military commitments overseas—what is usually called a “foreign policy of restraint.” The interesting question, though, is whether that is possible at an acceptable cost. Outside of the Middle East, the answer is almost certainly no. If they were to go further toward adopting a strategy of restraint whereby the United States does much less militarily around the world, they would have to make major sacrifices on alliances, nuclear proliferation, and spheres of influence that no Democratic commander in
